Hillary Clinton Defends Campaign: Yes, We Paid for Trump Dossier. So What?
Hillary Clinton Defends Campaign: Yes, We Paid for Trump Dossier. So What?
By Andrew Kerr
November 2, 2017 at 11:19am
Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton defended her campaign Wednesday evening for funding the salacious Fusion GPS dossier that claimed there were ties between then-candidate Donald Trump and Russia during the 2016 election.
Clinton told Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah that “of course” there was a difference between her campaign paying for the opposition research, which relied on high-level sources within the Kremlin, and allegations that members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to influence the outcome of the election.
“I think most serious people understand that,” Clinton said. “This was research started by a Republican donor during the Republican primary, and then when Trump got the nomination for the Republican Party, the people doing it came to my campaign lawyer.”
“He said ‘yes,’” Clinton said of her campaign lawyer, Marc Elias. “He’s an experienced lawyer, he knows what the law is, he knows what opposition research is.”
The Washington Post reported last week that Elias had retained Fusion GPS in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to conduct opposition research into Trump.
Fusion GPS, in turn, retained former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele between June 20 and Dec. 13, 2016.
Current reporting indicates that the unnamed Republican donor Clinton was referring to was long removed from the picture by the time Steele began compiling the dossier.
Steele produced a collection of 17 memos concerning Trump and Russia, including the infamous and unsubstantiated allegation that Trump solicited prostitutes to perform lewd acts on a hotel bed where former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, had previously stayed.
Elias emphatically denied any knowledge of the dossier for a whole year, according to Maggie Haberman of The New York Times.
The Times’ Kenneth Vogel added that he received vigorous pushback from Elias when he tried to report the story earlier this year.
Clinton pivoted to “an even bigger problem” after noting that the dossier wasn’t made public until after the election.
“The American people didn’t even know that the FBI was investigating the Trump campaign because of connections with Russia starting in the summer of 2016,” Clinton said. “I know that voters should have had that information.”
However, the fact that the Clinton campaign and the DNC had obfuscated from the public its payments to Fusion GPS for opposition research into Trump is an issue in and of itself, according to the Campaign Legal Center, which filed a Federal Election Commission complaint last week against the campaign and the DNC.
“They failed to accurately disclose the purpose and recipient of payments for the dossier of research alleging connections between then-candidate Donald Trump and Russia, effectively hiding these payments from public scrutiny, contrary to the requirements of federal law,” the CLC said in a statement.
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